Recovering Evangelicals #187 – Adam had ancestors!?
Christianity’s response to discoveries of ancient hominids today is exactly the same as their response to previous discoveries of “non-Adamic” people in the Americas … “they’re not human!”
Christianity today is not handling well the recent discoveries of ancient hominids. A lot of denial and dismissal; very little excitement or enthusiasm. One shouldn’t be surprised by this, nor wonder about how they might try to cope with this new knowledge, because we’ve already seen the playbook before: when the Church in the 17th century had to wrestle with the discoveries of indigenous peoples in far-off continents that were only accessible by the best technology of their era: ocean-going sailing ships. This discovery raised HUGE theological questions, as well as political ones. To call it paradigm changing would be an understatement. “How could there be people in the Americas or in the far polar regions if they can barely make canoes? They couldn’t possibly be descendants of Adam. And if not, are they even human? Do they have souls? If they’re not human, can we capture them and sell them as slaves?”
In this episode, we talk to Dr. David N. Livingstone, author of Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins, which explores that part of Church history in great detail.
We first looked at how the Church and Christianity understood anthropology and human origins over the course of three thousand years. Back when the Babylonians and Egyptians were in charge, the ancient Jews were fully committed to a worldview that all humans descended from a primal couple that were created by YHWH. Then the Greeks and Romans took over and introduced a new idea: the possibility that there were “monstrous races” that looked very non-human, living at the furthest reaches of the maps that they generated in their explorations. In fact, Pliny the Elder in the 1st century created a whole taxonomy of those creatures: in addition to the one-eyed cyclops that you may have seen in B-movies, there were people with dog-heads, and others with gigantic feet that were used to shield their heads from the sun; and many others. When the Roman Catholic Church took over, they debated a little bit about those “Plinians”: Augustine, in the 5th century, wrote a whole treatise on whether they were human or not, let alone “of Adam” and therefore possessing a soul. By the time of the Renaissance, though, the Church (and the world that it ruled) were fully committed to the idea that all people on Earth descended from Adam and Eve. And that Adam and Eve were Caucasian! (just look at any paintings from that period of history.) But then explorers set out across the oceans, “discovering” new continents and dutifully reporting that they never saw any “Plinians” … but there were other humans! Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Greenland.
And that’s when those uncomfortable theological questions sprang up, and thinking Christians had to start re-writing their theology.
We then talked with David about the amazingly close and provocative parallels between that period in Church history and the present one four centuries later, when we started discovering ancient hominids. And learning that some of the latter had the potential to be as intelligent and religiously-minded as Homo sapiens are.
There’s a lot of food for thought here, as we continue through this mini-series of episodes looking at the impact of recent scientific discoveries of ancient hominids on Christian theology.
As always, tell us your thoughts on this …
Find more information about Dr. David Livingstone at his faculty page.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out our collection of episodes on human evolution, or Luke’s book Standing On The Shoulders of Giants: Genesis and Human Origins.
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